The Matiushin Case (14 page)

At the morning roll call Arman ordered Pomogalov to leave the new men in formation and they marched off with the rest of the platoon. As they were approaching the zone, the cold surface of the sky suddenly turned a bright, tremulous blue and the sun glittered brilliantly, reflected in that coldness as if it was water. They crowded into the echoing concrete box of a small yard, glancing sideways through the massive, wide-open door of the guardhouse, then marched in a line into a gap that opened up in the old camp fortifications, where there were beams and rusty iron piles sticking out and mountainous heaps of sand. When they were released from duty, the men sat down to smoke. The titchy sergeant
–
a Chinese
–
was in command. Allowing the other soldiers to do nothing, he took Matiushin and Rebrov and led them off to a bleak spot where the repair work ended and the sandy strip of the perimeter security zone, overgrown with tufts of weeds, stretched off wearily into the distance. He walked about for a while with his clever little face wrinkled up, sighed a bit, scrunched the sand underfoot and ordered them to clear the security strip of tufts of grass.

Matiushin wandered along the walls, kicking out the tufts with his boot. Rebrov scrabbled in the sand, making an effort, working, moving forward and, although he wanted to seem independent, he soon lost patience and shouted:

‘Come and work, you bastard! And quick! I don't want to lose people's respect here because of you! I respect myself.'

They clashed with a dull thud, fell and rolled in the sandy soil, scrabbling and trying to choke each other. A sentry spotted them fighting from his watchtower and called the Chinese from the reinforcement works. He came running, panting hard, with a piece of wire that he'd picked up on the way, and when he reached them he immediately lashed out without speaking. That whistling wire burned more viciously than fire. They jumped up at his first swing, but the Chinese started circling round menacingly and lashing at them, giving them no chance to gather their wits. The blinding pain spun them round and set them running. The Chinese kept up with them, driving them all the way to the end, where the band of soldiers greeted them with loud horse laughs.

Matiushin whiled away the rest of the working time with Karpovich, smoking at his expense. They set an iron pile in the ground where Karpovich had already dug a pit, working on his own, and for the first time in his life Matiushin saw a real live convict. A team of them, welders, were led out to the repairs. They welded hooks onto the ready piles. There were showers of fiery sparks and glimpses of the convicts' lean, stringy bodies as they moved out from behind the sparks and then back in under the bright rain. Suddenly one of them dived out from under the fiery shower. He slung an armful of the iron rods he needed onto his shoulder and set off, slowed by the weight. For about ten steps he smiled, looking at Matiushin
–
the new, unfamiliar soldier who was standing in his way. But the only thing Matiushin made out was that all his teeth were metal, and then
–
without even remembering the face, because the convict was sweeping past him in a tight, living bundle of sinew and muscle
–
he saw the tattoo on the man's chest: devils being boiled in a cauldron. For just an instant Matiushin fancied that those devils were alive. As the convict stepped out, the devils in the cauldron twitched and squirmed about. Sensing that the soldier was eyeing him, the convict rasped out audaciously:

‘Move aside! Make
way!'

After lunch and a sleep this platoon went off to the zone and the other one, with Dybenko, came back. He and Matiushin met like old buddies and embraced. The guards in this prison-camp platoon embraced as if they were kissing
–
they shook hands, took the other man's shoulder with their free hand and pressed their cheeks together.

A day later Matiushin ended up working under Dybenko's watch tower. Dybenko spent his watch on the tower as if he was the boss. He took a stout board out from under the roof of his little kennel, arranged it crosswise and sat on it with his back held straight, so it looked like he was standing. Occasionally throwing a word down to Matiushin pottering about in the perimeter security zone, he would suddenly strike up a conversation with someone out of sight, looking straight ahead, over into the zone. Sitting in the pit between the fences, Matiushin could hear the voices. A twisted rag bundle flew up over the camp wall towards the tower. But it didn't flop down loosely: its load must have been heavy
–
and Dybenko caught
it.

‘All right, get on with it!' he shouted to someone when he'd emptied the rag, and turned his head back towards freedom.

A khaki-coloured sack went flying over into the zone, and then another
one.

‘And you stop gawking, it's too soon for you yet!' Dybenko growled to Matiushin, spotting that the soldier had frozen below the tower and was watching.

Beyond the tower, the invisible railway station droned and clattered. The local trains howled like hysterical bitches, right on schedule. Dybenko said nothing while he thought, gazing into the zone like a statue, and then he came to
life.

‘Listen, there's no one around, run over to the shop in the station and get some bagels. You're the suicide soldier. Come on, pay back your debt! Don't get the wind up, you're not the first, it's been done before. Get up this wall!'

The camp wall was like a raft battened tight against the sky. Dybenko encouraged him offhandedly in the climb, indifferent to anything that might happen apart from the bagels. He handed Matiushin a paper rouble that he'd just earned, curled into a trough in his fingers, and pointed to a squat, grubby little house at the station, with a heap of coal lying abandoned beside it under the open sky and strange, spindly trees growing skywards. Matiushin, already sitting on the fence, glanced around fitfully, didn't see any men in shoulder straps in all that open space
–
and jumped down into the tall wild grass that grew outside the
camp.

In the shop they weren't surprised to see the soldier. Women were standing in a queue. Boorish cockroaches were running across the floorboards. A cat was dozing right there on the counter
–
he must have been the languid, aged serving woman's favourite. Matiushin waited his turn in the queue, turning numb when the door swung open and banged shut behind him, and walked out, burying his dead hands in the fragrant muff of bagels. He ran quickly over the stretch of wasteland, stuffed his purchase into the front of his tunic and climbed back into the zone with even greater difficulty, his belly swollen out by the bagels.

It was July. Halfway through it the rain gave way to heat
–
but steppe heat, with free-ranging winds and shuddering cold at night. It turned out that the officers had all gone off on leave at the beginning of the month. The only ones left in the company were Arman and sergeant-major Pomogalov, whom the young political officer clearly didn't
like.

Matiushin improved Arman's opinion of him, without even knowing it, at the rifle range. He could shoot, because he had often been allowed to amuse himself like that at his father's bases, where he was given either a pistol or an automatic rifle to blast away with. When he fired a gun for the first time, as a boy, he thought he'd gone deaf and for a long time he couldn't understand what had happened. Devastated by the sheer din, as if he were a metal barrel and the automatic had been fired at him, the next time he fired as if he had already learned from practice that an automatic rifle requires strength, but only as much strength as an ordinary meat mincer. So now at the rifle range he simply squeezed himself up tight against the butt, saw the targets, set the sight on each of them in his mind's eye and fired when the officer gave the command. All the targets were downed. Before the line-up, when the shooting was over, Arman praised him loudly. Then he suddenly walked over to one of the sergeants, a Tajik, ordered him to hand over his automatic, struck a pose, but didn't lie down, and fired off two full clips in rapid succession, mowing down the same targets with sheer sustained bursts of fire. The Tajik stood there without stirring a muscle, stony-faced. After his amusement, the political officer tossed the automatic that he didn't need any more into the man's hands. Back in the barracks, as the men cleaned their weapons, this sergeant flung his rifle, with its fouled barrel, down on the floor, and started weeping angrily in front of everyone, not embarrassed, and Matiushin heard him curse the young political officer through his teeth.

‘Arman, may your mother croak, may your father croak … May your children croak … ' And then the Tajik resigned himself to what this man had done to him, to the pain he had caused him, and wiped the tears off his
face.

That evening Pomogalov's platoon went off to the zone, but the political officer kept the sergeant-major in the company headquarters and appointed himself officer of the guard in his place. Every time Arman went out on guard duty was special and this time there were two new soldiers on duty. Nobody was pleased. Matiushin was given an automatic in the weapons room and he lined up with everybody else on the parade ground, but the news that they were going on duty with Arman made him feel coerced and guilty. The guardhouse was like a beehive. Even inside it everything seemed as though it was waxed and had the sweetish smell of some kind of myrrh.

Before the squad left for the zone Arman ordered everyone to be searched, as if they weren't marching off to guard convicts but were convicts themselves. It wasn't clear to Matiushin why they were frisked, after all they left the guardhouse just as they had been, except that now they were armed. He was put on ‘number three', the third tower on the circle of the camp
–
a quiet, swampy spot, where there was a little factory. However, apart from the factory's swollen wall, Matiushin didn't see anything. The zone was boxed in by walls and couldn't be seen even from the tower. During the second shift when it was already night, the black swamp around the little factory greeted Matiushin with blank silence. He could see the fences by the lights, but all he could hear was the rustling whisper of the air. Because his hearing wasn't very good, he fancied there was something alive behind every shadow. And then he started imagining sounds as well
–
rushing movements in the night, knocking and footsteps.

After a while, although he didn't hear any steps, Matiushin saw two shadows on the squad path, already close to the tower, but after a moment he made out a peaked cap and realised that one of these men was Arman. Arman climbed up onto the tower in silence and made him explain why they hadn't been hailed as they approached, peering at him angrily, not believing that Matiushin had seen them and simply forgotten to shout. Matiushin served out his watch more dead than alive and went back to the guardhouse, tormented now by his deafness and afraid to tell anyone about it. But after that night he found himself in the guard officer's room, and Arman, continuing his night-time interrogation in the morning, wouldn't let him out. Matiushin was so tired and short of sleep that he could barely stay on his feet, so he told the truth without even thinking about it: that his deafness was to blame. The young political officer listened but, for some reason, he grimaced fastidiously, interrupted Matiushin mid-word and ordered him to leave.

After suffering through the full twenty-four hours of the watch with agonised endurance, Matiushin had come to terms with the previous night and regretted now that he had complained about his disability. As for Arman, whether he had forgotten about that twenty-four hours or not, the only sign he gave afterwards was to cast an occasional sidelong glance at Matiushin
–
and it seemed as if what was said in the guard officer's room was already a thing of the
past.

The zone was painfully casting off its old skin and renewing itself. Major repairs were under way: stretches of the old wire-mesh fences were knocked down, together with their posts. Replacement wire was shipped in and lay about in tight steel rolls. Iron piles with hooks were being set up to replace the wooden pillars. After tearing the wooden beams off the old wire-mesh fences like bones out of a fish, the men started rolling them up, as if they were rolling large wire snowballs. They rolled up a path of wire three metres wide, and soon the prickly, rusty snowball was taller than a man. When they simply couldn't push it any more, they cut the ends of the wire and started all over again.

The convicts had to finish the welding work on the fortifications, and Matiushin had just been taken off the tower, he was free, so Pomogalov took him along. Pomogalov urged the convicts on, making them work, and Matiushin sat at the side with his automatic, keeping an eye on things. The sergeant-major sweated harder than the workers did and in the end he was genuinely delighted that they managed to get things done in time. The convicts had a foreman who hardly did any work but they all obeyed him
–
he lay there in the shadow under a tower, wrapped in a monkey jacket as if he were sick, and talked to the team. He asked the sergeant-major's permission to prepare
chifir
, narcotically strong tea, for the team before they went back into the zone. Pomogalov gave permission and sat down with them when they started lighting a little fire with the splinters of wood that were lying around everywhere. Matiushin sat about five steps from the fire, amazed at how familiarly the sergeant-major spoke and even laughed with the convicts, and they soon got high when they started passing the sooty tin can round the circle.

Serving in a camp had an enticing freedom to it. Life there was solitary and calm. After he started standing guard on a tower, Matiushin had unexpectedly grown unaccustomed to people, because the men were on guard duty for twenty-four hours and slept like wolves, each on his own, and came back to a barracks that was already empty, where even against their will they lived like wolves again
–
sleeping for the night, eating, sleeping again, and then going away again, leaving this lair to the others, whom they had seen for only ten minutes in the little guardhouse yard, during the changing of the guard, when they handed over the zone's protection. Everyone kept secrets from everyone else, everyone skulked and hid. Those who had stood their watch kept their mouths tight shut and clammed up at the slightest thing. These secrets made the guardhouse seem dark and impenetrable, but the darkness in its blank, windowless rooms was permanent in any
case.